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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Thank you, Veronica.

I know you've all heard of (and heard) Susan Boyle by now, right? I HEART SUSAN BOYLE... as much as I loathe those smug sniggering spectators whose collective eye-roll could be heard across the Atlantic when someone DARED to step onto a stage in front of them who was not conventionally attractive, and no their later cheering did not make me like them. Only the ones who actually cried are off the hook and no longer need fear my scorn. Bonus points for wearing sackcloth and throwing ashes on oneself.

Anyway. I've kind of had a blog post in my head about the Susan Boyle phenomenon, and I even sat and typed one out late at night a couple of nights ago but, like most serious and heartfelt things I type at 2 AM, it was too maudlin for words and also very rambly and not quite coherent, so I have not posted it here even though I am in desperate need of content. Then today, Veronica at Toddled Dredge (if she's not featured in your RSS reader she really, really should be) posted something so wonderful and spot-on about Miss Boyle and our attitudes about beauty that I no longer have to come up with a post and can just link you to hers, because she put what I was thinking into much better words than I could have done, 2 AM or no. Here you go.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

perspective

You may have heard about the problems Iceland is facing right now. What I haven't seen any mainstream coverage about is the effect this situation is having on ordinary people. I have a friend in Iceland. We met nearly a decade ago when I started an egroup for expectant mothers and she was the first to join. Her daughter is eight days younger than mine. This morning my friend told us that their last bank had collapsed, taking their currency down with it, and that stores, no longer able to import food due to the impossible exchange rate, are emptying. She is understandably frightened. (Our group is doing what we can to help. We can send food and love, but we can't do much about long-term hope, unfortunately.)

I don't even know where I was going with this, other than a nebulous be-grateful-for-what-you-have kind of idea that seems ludicrously inadequate and trite at this point. It's just been a very sobering situation for me. I am full of heartache for my friend, and I wanted to share the human side of the story that (in my reading anyway) has mainly had its focus on the more political aspects of one little nation's economic collapse.

Friday, August 01, 2008

thank you notes

Apparently the reason that I am not frantically gathering irreplaceable items and loading them and my family into our cars this morning is that a man who lives a few miles from here, when his house caught fire around 2 AM, ran out in his unmentionables, got on his tractor, and cut a firebreak so that the inferno wouldn't spread to his neighbors. The sirens, and the neighborhood dogs' reactions to the sirens (you never really know how many dogs are in your area until there's an emergency response in the middle of the night), woke me as I was juuust about to go to sleep, and I went outside to reassure myself that there wasn't a fire, only to see with my own two eyes that actually there was. Thank you, homeowner, for your presence of mind and probable sacrifice of your belongings, since you could have been grabbing them and fleeing instead of preventing another week of heartache and disaster in our area.

While I'm on the subject, the nearby city's paper ran a story about our fire that made me cry a little. There's a guy who lived in the immediate area of the beginning of the fire. When he and his neighbors got the order to evacuate, he got a frantic call from a neighbor whose husband was out of town and who had no way of getting her four horses to safety. Rather than save anything of his own, the guy got on his horse and led his neighbor's horses (and one other neighbor's donkey) out to safety. He lost everything -- except the eternal friendship and hero-worship of every animal lover in the state.

Most of the fire crews have been loading up and heading out -- some to go home, and some to head to the northern part of the county to fight the much-reduced remnant of the fire (which, it turns out, at 34,000 total acres burned, is still way less than one-twentieth of our county. Who knew?). I am not given to emotional flights of fancy -- my tearful reaction to the above story, to be brutally honest, was more because the guy self-sacrificially put his neighbors' needs over his own, and lost all his unique rawhide-braiding tools and equipment to save some horses that could probably have made it to safety on their own, than because animals are some kind of holy creatures that should be rescued at all costs, and you can all hate me now -- and I know that they're getting paid (probably plentiful overtime) for their work and it's their job to go where they're told and put out fires. But even so I got a little lump in my throat every time a truckload of them would drive by, because job or not, they've been here for a week risking their safety to save my town instead of being at home kissing their wives hello after work and playing Lego with their kids. (Or, you know, hanging out with their roommates playing Nintendo. Whatever. Most of them are awfully young.)

And with that, it's past time for me to be outside watering my garden and hanging clothes, with especial thanks to God and my neighbors and some 4,000 assorted strangers that I still have a garden to water and clothes to hang. Book post tomorrow... I hope.

Monday, January 28, 2008

ugh

It's been a really long time since Nameless Dread kept me awake. Well, it HAD been, to be precise.

Part of it is the new dog. In a very small way, it's like having a newborn -- you can't communicate with her, she can't tell you what she wants, there are constant Excretory Issues to be dealt with, you lose sleep, she upsets your household in just about every way, and over everything else there's this keen sense that I have REALLY got myself in for it now and tell me again what was so wrong with life before we decided to do this? So there's that. It's not that we aren't glad to have the dog, or that we don't like her. It's just that claustrophobic PPD-ish feeling you get when you look at the long years of your life to come and can't imagine that any of them will not contain the stress that you feel this very minute.

And then the weather doesn't help. It's positively dreary, and almost unrelentingly wet and windy and cold. (This makes taking the dog out to go potty tons of fun.) In our happy and careless Renting Days, a few weeks of weather like this made for an adventure, even if by the end of it your kids were attempting to tear each other limb from limb what with the whole cabin-fever-all-summer-in-a-day kind of crabbiness. It was a great opportunity to wax rhapsodic about sitting by the fire with a purring cat and Jane Eyre. Remember that? But now we have this very big investment (pardon me while I have an Official Mortgage Freakout) standing out in all this wind and weather, and everything is our responsibility. If a tree falls on the roof, or the water pipes at the well freeze under the snow because the stupid shed keeps blowing away and we can't build a real well-house until the stupid weather lets up (and what the heck kind of people have a well just sitting out in the open for all these years anyway?), or if the roof leaks (when the roof leaks, I should say)... there's no landlord who's going to call a contractor to come and fix it while we sit back and watch, no sirree. I used to love winter. Now I can't wait for 105-degree days when the sun comes up at five and doesn't go down until nine, because that weather isn't going to break my house, so there's much less need to sit up cringing all night waiting for disaster to strike.

Add in a bunch of small stuff like T deciding that we're going to leave the congregation where we've been for eight years (not to be hard on T -- it's a difficult decision for him and he's doing the right thing, painful as it is), and worry about whether the kids will ever find the kind of lifelong friendship that I wish they could have, and the irrational fear that I am being a terrible mother and doing an awful job and that people who said homeschooling was bad for kids must be right, and the state of the world and the direction we're heading as a culture, and whether tomatoes and apples will ever be both good and cheap again, and here you have me, blogging aimlessly at one o'clock on a Monday morning with a mass of unease settled deep in the pit of my stomach. Which is stupid, because LOOK AT MY LIFE. But there it is -- Nameless Dread never claimed to be logical.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

is this the real life?

(bonus points if you're humming a Queen song now.)

Yesterday my husband emailed me this story (go ahead and at least skim it and come back or this will make no sense a-tall to you), and asked if I thought it was an accurate snapshot of the way women think. I told him, as I am telling you now, that I wouldn't know about the women-in-the-bar scene, or what it's really like "out there" for single women my age, because I and all my (staggering array of) women friends are married and have been that way for a while. This is what it's like in women's BOOKS, I'll say that.

What really made my stomach clench up was this bit in the men's equivalent article (linked at the bottom of the women's one):

Q: How far will you guys go that first time you’re together?

Joe: All the way.

Brendan: How far would I go, or how far would I go and have a relationship afterwards? Because if I get everything the first time we’re together, I probably won’t be calling her back.

Beecher: That’s horrible. But I will say that if she’s willing to hook up on the first date, it says something about her attitude.

Joe: For me, it wouldn’t matter. I’m not going to judge her based on whether she goes all the way, because, to tell the truth, I will if she will.

Beecher: It’s not a deal-breaker. If she makes me wait, so long as it’s not too long, that’s fine.

Q: How long is too long to wait to do the deed?
Beecher: Three dates.

Brendan: For someone I really liked, I’d wait months.

Joe: To tell you the truth, I haven’t had to wait any longer than three or four dates, so I don’t really know. But I’d have a very hard time waiting as long as Brendan.

These men are in their twenties. That means that, considering the way social mores trend downward, twenty years from now, when my daughter is in their age, it's going to be like that to the twentieth power, I would think. Or at least times twenty (observe my staggering mathematical acumen as I completely pull this theory out of the air). Or whatever. But it's going to be worse than this, I think we can all agree on that, yes? And those are going to be the men in the world who will be looking at my daughter as she walks down the street and goes about her business. Frankly it makes me want to pick out a few prospects who might be OK and then take out every other male who looks at her. Really, though, I'm going to try to save this article until she's old enough to discuss this topic, say eight or ten years, and point out to her that this is what average men of the world will think of her. They will think of her as someone who isn't worth waiting three dates to have sex with. Please God I hope there are some parents out there bringing up their sons to be different, and please God I hope that He will help us to bring up our children (both of them) to see the harm in this kind of lifestyle and avoid it like the plague.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

prayers, please

Those of you who pray, please lift up my mother-in-law, who is in her very early 50's and who was diagnosed last week with lung cancer. This week she had a PET scan and discovered that it has moved to one of her lymph nodes and is possibly in one of her kidneys. Prognosis is not great -- "a few months to a year" is what the specialists are saying right now -- and she goes in for chemo and then radiation early next week.

She's so young for this, and she quit smoking years ago. She's also not a believer, I don't think, and I know her husband isn't.

I certainly don't need anything else this week to put my minor problems in perspective.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

deliberateness (or whatever)

Amy posted yesterday about deliberateness (is that a word? If not, it's my invention, not Amy's) in our decisions, which touched off a train of thought for me, about which I'll post here, rather than using her comments section for it.

When T and I married, and actually largely before we even married, we made several conscious decisions about the way our new family (that's us plus whatever children God blessed us with) would be. A few of the boundaries we set early on were:

• We would homeschool our children if God made it at all possible.
• I would not have an outside-the-house job that required us to put our children in day care. (we were not sure if we would be able to manage without my income long-term, so we decided that if I HAD to work, we would put our children in a private Christian school. Praise God that he has enabled us to go with Plan A. ;)
• Divorce was never going to be an option on the table. We could disagree, we could fight, but it was never our marriage on the line.
• We would not belittle each other in any way -- not in anger, not to make a joke, not to show affection.
• We would not engage in "coarse jesting", with each other or with our children. (in other words: no potty humor).
• We wouldn't teach our children to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, or any of the other imaginary beings whose existence they would later discover to be a sham, because we didn't want them to end up lumping our faith in God in with all those other invisible, imaginary people Mom and Dad had told them about.

Now, every family has a set of values, whether they mean to or not. Ours may mark us out as "weird" to other people, and frequently do, and we've had to deal with several different instances of confrontation about one or more of the above items (and there are others as well). But every family either consciously or otherwise lands in a pattern -- a set of priorities. Some people decisively set out to reach a certain financial goal -- to own a home, to be independent, to be able to clothe their children in brand names (this, by the way, was one of my hard and fast goals before I was a Christian and before homeschooling became mainstream. If my children were going to go to school then they were going to have to have whatever was trendy, from their shoes on up, because I figured that was their best shot at avoiding the kind of school experience I had). Some families just kind of fall into a lifestyle that suits them, without ever really thinking about it or setting hard and fast boundaries -- "beyond this point we will not go." I think, honestly, that this is the average American family -- shaped by TV, trends, peers, youth culture. We tend to stand out in rather a startling way from this average family. No, I haven't seen the commercial for X or the episode of that show where Y does blah blah. No, I can't just go get a job so that we can buy a house, because we believe firmly that my place is here with my kids, even if that means we rent for the rest of our natural lives. No, my kids don't climb on a yellow bus and wave goodbye and leave me with six hours of structurable alone time every day. My kids talk differently from their peers, and they dress differently (as do their parents), and they don't notice or care that they're different. This "differentness" was not the goal of the priorities we set, at least not in most ways, but it is definitely a byproduct of it.

Occasionally we'll come to a crisis (financial or otherwise) regarding some of those priorities; we (I) may tear our (my) hair out looking for a way to slip by and somehow manage to uphold what we know is right while simultaneously denying it, but in the end it's of course impossible. And each of those times I do remember why we decided to do things the way we do. In fact I think God lets me have those moments of trying to wiggle under the fences we set up so early on, just so that I can remind myself why we built them in the first place. A few weeks ago I was pressing my husband hard; I wanted to take a night job so that we could afford to buy a house. He said no, and reminded me that really we don't want to be a family where one person's always coming in as the other goes out; we know that's not what we want to be locked into. But we prayed, and then gee, one day out of the blue (who'd a thunk it!) we both at once came up with the idea of sub-leasing the apartment over our garage, which our landlord had told us in the past we can do, until we reach a defined point in one year where our financial status will be better for some very boring reasons. At first the landlord backpedaled when we brought it up; we got off the phone and prayed, and he called the next day to tell us he'd reverted to his original position. So we'll proceed prayerfully and see what happens; our hope is that this will enable us to pay off the little bit of debt we have and build up some savings before we make the decision to plunge ourselves into a California-sized mortgage (the very thought of which gives me a freaked-out tingly kind of feeling. Remember when a quarter of a million dollars seemed like just a huge amount of money? It's apparently chump change in the California real estate market. Ouch.)

All this is just one example, chosen to show why I believe God will bless us if we deliberately choose to honor Him and His plan in our priorities, and come to Him with the difficulties caused by that choice rather than deciding not to honor him after all. It's a hard lesson sometimes, but I think if He hits me over the head with it often enough I'll eventually get it.

Monday, March 28, 2005

we've been on the slippery slope for years and just not known it.

I found this article linked from Molly's site. The whole article is difficult to wade through, for more reasons than one, but the basic gist of it is:

1) Passive euthanasia, practiced quietly at hospitals around the world,
is the practice of denying care to infants so that they die. Often
it's done to infants who have serious birth defects; denial of defect-related treatment (or sometimes any treatment at all) allows them to die. Generally it involves parental consent; however, in Europe especially, parental consent is becoming increasingly unnecessary. We personally had a daughter in 1997 who was born with a serious congenital heart defect; my husband I and were mystified and frustrated at the way her doctors continually disregarded our increasing concerns about her worsening condition, refused to move her corrective surgery date any nearer, and changed from one week to the next the standard for what was acceptable regarding her condition. (Week 4: Well, 02 saturations in the 80's are ok for her, but if she drops into the 70's, that's when we get concerned. Week 6: 70's won't hurt her; it's in the 60's that we get concerned. Week 8: An occasional dip into the 60's won't hurt her, but staying there for long periods, that's what we want to avoid. And so on.) At the time, we basically trusted their judgment and attributed their behavior to inattentiveness, failure to communicate with each other, or lack of emotional involvement in the case. Somewhere in the intervening years, in looking over her records and my updates about her case, I began to suspect that something like this might have been going on, but doubted it, because I simply didn't want to believe that doctors could do such a thing. Now, I wonder. Angrily. As I think I've mentioned here before, Natalie died at nine weeks of age, three weeks before the age at which she was supposed to have had her surgery.

2) Babies aren't really persons in the strict sense.

cf: "... it is difficult to determine specifically when in human ontogeny persons strictly emerge. Socializing infants into the role person draws the line conservatively. Humans do not become persons strictly until sometime after birth... . Unlike persons strictly, who are bearers of both rights and duties, persons in the social sense have rights but no duties. That is, they are not morally responsible agents, but are treated with respect (ie, rights are imputed to them) in order to establish a practice of considerable utility to moral agents: a society where kind treatment of the infirm and weak is an established practice... .The social sense of a person is a way of treating certain instances of human life in order to secure the life of persons strictly.

In other words, a person's not REALLY a person till s/he is "a morally responsible agent", and letting anyone else (especially a baby) be considered a person is basically just being nice.

This is an article in a respected medical journal. This is not some
scaremongering site. What is happening in our world??

Monday, March 21, 2005

Thinking about Terri Schiavo

There have been a lot of really good posts about Terri Schiavo in the past few days, and I don't have a lot to add to them, but I just went and watched some of the videos of Terri interacting with her family and her doctors, and I read this article written by one of the lawyers involved in the case (thanks Kristen for the link), and all I have to say is this.

If Terri Schiavo is in a "persistent vegetative state", then this:

is just a blob of tissue.


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Thursday, March 10, 2005

The H word

I think pretty much every mother has this happen at some point.

Today C is just being, well, a little pill, in lots of little five-year-old ways. This is not so uncommon a thing as to really bother me, or to even be worth noting. She's distractable when it comes to schoolwork, she is obstinate about wanting enchiladas for breakfast even though I've told her those are for lunch, she continually interrupted me while I was doing my Bible reading, etc. She's being suitably punished when she needs it. The kicker, though, came when I told her to go change out of her pajamas into daytime clothes. She got as far as taking off her pajamas (and throwing them on the living-room floor), and selecting play clothes from her stack on the coffee table and carrying them into her room, but she kept coming out of her room to play, still naked. I would remind her (decreasingly gently) that she was supposed to be getting dressed, until finally I tapped her on the bottom and sent her sternly to her room to get dressed or get restriction (THE BIGGIE). On her way to her room, she muttered, "I hate you, Mommy."

Whoa.

I: "What did you say?"
She: "Nothing."
LT: "She gets over it."
I: "What? Gets over what?"
LT: "She says it sometimes. Then she kind of gets used to you again."
I: [thinking, !!!! this happens, what, often? Don't know whether to get angry or cry, so do neither, just sit and stare at the computer screen]
LT: "It'll be OK."
C: "I was joking..."

Now, like I said, I know this happens to pretty much every parent at some point. I just remember, you know, being a little older than five when I threw the "H" word at my mom. More like, I dunno, fifteen.

In the end, when she came out (dressed) and hugged me and said she really does like me, I told her that it's OK to be angry with Mommy, it's part of growing up and having to do things you don't want to do. But it's never OK to say mean things just to hurt someone, even when you're angry, and that means Mommy too.

I feel like I should have handled it far better than that. I just am not at all sure how.

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